After all, as we the idiots and great unwashed learned some time ago just by paying attention, Special Prosecutor Butcher previously announced that he would probably finish his investigation in the 'New Year' which led to all sorts of wild-eyed predictions, et cetera, as 2015 dawned.

My take?

The Dean has brand new all important, super-secret insider-accessed information that an announcement on that investigation is coming soon.

But here's the thing that few have been talking about, which is that the already declared candidate for the Conservative nomination in that highest of high-fat ridings is none other than the former Cremeinator herself, Ms. Jennifer Clarke:

...The Conservative Party has yet to hold a nomination contest there and one candidate running to carry the Tory banner is Jennifer Clarke...

Gosh.

Will wonders never cease?

________Can the Knotty Gordian win in that riding?....Of course he can...After all, this is Cremeville we're talking about....In other words, it's the place where the chosen ones did absolutely fabulously under Premier Gord while everyone else in the province paid.And don't forget....It was Laila who figured out that something was going down here first.... Just by paying attention.

Seriously though, one of the things I love about going to spring training, Cactus League division, is heading out to the minor league camps to watch all the old guys/stars from days gone by hanging around the orange groves doing stuff like hitting fungos into the high desert sun and throwing batting practice gopher balls from behind wire mesh screens.

****

Speaking of old guys....

Here's Luke Appling hitting a quasi-legitimate big league home run during a 1982 old timers game at JFK Stadium in Washington off of Warren Spahn.

The kicker here is that Mr. Appling was 75 years young at the time.

________The irony?....During a big-league career that spanned 21 seasons Appling only hit 45 home runs, total... His best year was eight.The take home message?...As a young man (i.e. during his playing days) Appling was known as 'Old Aches And Pains' because he was always complaining about this or that minor ailment...Ha!

Made a quick trip over to Victoria this weekend to see my Mom and Pops, in part to help them set up their WiFi as well as their tablet-thingy, which was not entirely easy given that neither of the experts in the family, also known as Bigger E. and littler e., was with me.

Anyway....

While downstairs at Mom and Pops I found myself perusing some linear-type geopoliticallishmishmashable material from days gone by and came upon the following 'historical' passage:

"...(T)he nation of Canada will never be as great as the United States so long as it continues to burden its citizens with universal health care, refuses to drill for oil in federally protected wildlife reserves, and neglects its duty to blindly support unilateral invasions of Middle Eastern states..."

So.

Where the heckfire did that come from?

Why none other than a hefty tome published by the fine folks at The Onion titled "Our Dumb World: Atlas Of The Planet Earth".

Based on unimpeachable sources (eg. the statements of Gordon Campbell and current BC Liberal government press-type releases etc.), Mr. Palmer figures that the Dippers from way back when (i.e. starting in 1992) scooped $2.5 billion out of Hydro and dumped it into general revenue. The Dean of the Lotuslandian Legislative Press Gallery then goes on to surmise that that number has since risen kinda/sorta modestly to $5.4 billion under the BC Liberals which has led to a borrowing hole of $3.2 billion.

And Mr. Palmer's point?

Well, as near as I can figure it, it is designed to inform us, with all the established credibility (and top-drawer access of insider boweevel info) that he can muster that 'both sides do it' and that they always will.

Norm Farrell, who is crazy enough to eschew all that boweevil insider info business and actually comb through publicly accessible financial databases in detail has come to the conclusion that the good Mr. Palmer's numbers and conclusions are falsely equivalent in the extreme:

...Since 2001, BC Hydro payments to government total almost $10 billion and it does not take a graduate degree in finance to know, had that money not been paid out, the crown corporation's borrowings would be reduced by the same amount. It is an illogical fiction to pretend that only $3.2 billion had to be borrowed to make payments to government during the past 23 years...

And, for good measure, Mr. Farrell has the following to say about the Tale of Two Clarks chapter in this saga:

... (Mr.) Palmer could also have reported that when Glen Clark became Premier, BC Hydro's long-term debt was $7.496 billion and, when he left the office three years later, it was $7.474 billion. When Christy Clark became Premier, the utility's debt was $11.712 billion. According to the September 2014 financial statements, the debt was $16.588 billion, not the lesser amount from ten months ago noted on the BC Liberal's press notes...

Rod Mickleburgh, writing for free, writes three great tributes on the passing of Alicia Priest, Sean Rossiter and Doug Sagi.

Here is just one passage, but go read it all:...Alicia (after learning she had ALS) faced her fate head on. She chose to regard it as a deadline for a writing project she’d had in her mind for years: the story of her family and her flawed, off-beat father, who masterminded the great Yukon silver heist of the early 1960’s. Of course, it was a deadline no writer or reporter would ever want, but it was a deadline nevertheless, one referred to by Alicia as “the ultimate deadline”. As always, she met it with flying colours. Her book, A Rock Fell on the Moon, was published to glowing reviews last fall. Best of all, although unable to speak and nourished through a tube, Alicia was able to return to the Yukon in October for a very special book launch at the Baked Café in Whitehorse...

Friday, January 16, 2015

From Sean Craig's Canadaland series on Ms. Amanda Lang's efforts to kill the MoCo's story about RBC's in-sourcing of temporary foreign workers so that they could be trained to take the trainers' (i.e. Canadian) jobs:...(A)s CBC journalists across the country pulled in information to advance the story, they were summoned to a conference call with Kathy Tomlinson (who was the lead investigatory journalist on the story) and, to their surprise: Amanda Lang.

CANADALAND spoke to three CBC employees who were on the conference call with Tomlinson and Lang.

Lang, they recall, relentlessly pushed to undermine the RBC story. She argued that RBC was in the right, that their outsourcing practices were “business as usual,” and that the story didn’t merit significant coverage. She and a defiant Tomlinson faced off in a tense, extended argument. Two of the CBC employees we spoke to recall a wave of frustrated hang-ups by participants.

“I cannot emphasize enough how wrong it was,” said one CBC employee we spoke to. “That another journalist, not involved in a story, would intervene in the reporting of others and question the integrity of her colleagues like that. I haven’t seen anything like it before or since.”...

Gosh.

Sure glad we don't have any journos 'round here that take money and favours from the fine folks they cover.

________Alison has more, much more, on the toothless tigger that the MoCo/CBC is fast becoming.And don't you just wish that bloggers, the folks who have brought all this stuff to light, had just a wee bit more established 'credibility'?...Because that's what matters...Right?

Stephen Hume an excellent piece on the BCLiberal government practice of 'obscrurantism' (i.e. pretending to be transparent while hiding the real facts from we, the public) that is embodied by the situation at BC Ferries up at the VSun:

...Thanks to government ideology, millions of ferry passengers have been driven off by a policy of raising prices and slashing services while foisting overhead onto small community users to whom ferries are not a discretionary recreational diversion but an essential service for getting to doctors’ appointments, school, work, minor hockey tournaments and the grocery store.

Does anyone still subscribe to the illusion that this corporate fairy tale serves any other purpose than to obscure the way in which capital debt is shifted from where it belongs, on the province’s books?...

_______You know, it would be much easier for those amongst us who are not reality challenged to cut these people some slack if there was any evidence whatsoever that what they do in the name of ideology and regressive anti-people policies actually works...But there is not...And Ms. Clark actually does understand that reality.

There is a lot in there and a lot of it is worth considering including the advances that can be made when a kid's education is 'personalized'.

But then there is this part, especially the bolded part, which Ms. Miller just leaves hanging:

...But this (personalized education) is a heck of a lot easier to achieve with the advantage of specialist teachers, ubiquitous technology and teacher training. Public school districts receive about $7,800 per student for operations (not including capital expenditures) from government. Private schools receive up to half of that amount in government subsidies—in addition to the $10,000 to $20,000 parents pay annually. In short, policymakers will need to invest more in specialist teachers and teacher training if they hope to make personalization a reality in public classrooms...

Key information about the new Okanagan jail, including its long-term cost to taxpayers, remains locked away in government files.

A freedom of information request filed by the Western News to obtain copies of the construction timeline, details of contractor performance penalties and the 30-year schedule of payments was denied almost in full.

In its response letter, the Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services cited provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that allow it to withhold information it believes could harm the financial interests of the government and its business partners...

About the building of a jail?

Do they really and truly believe that we are all saps?

Luckily for us that don't want to be (saps, I mean) Mr. Fries did a little more digging:

During construction, the province will make payments totalling $73 million, and Plenary Justice, a consortium of private companies, will fund the balance of the $120-million capital cost with money it raised through a private bond issue.

Over the next three decades, B.C. taxpayers will then pay back to Plenary Justice that $120 million with interest, plus make regular life-cycle and maintenance payments, according to the documents obtained by the Western News. However, the actual payment amounts, spread over 360 months, were redacted...

And, of course, there is this too:

...Boundary-Similkameen (BC Liberal/Clarklandian) MLA Linda Larson, in whose riding the jail is being built, did not respond to a request for comment...

...“This report is not intended to, and does not, answer questions regarding the specific allegations against the employees,” wrote McNeil in a covering message. “Nor does it answer any lingering questions regarding whether any decision made about the employees was legally or factually sound.”...

Mr. Palmer also zoomed in another aspect of report that we, the great unwashed amongst the idiots in the bloggodome already discussed weeks ago (see comments) which is the following:

...One of the more disturbing lapses in due process was disclosed in a footnote to the report: “At no time before the termination decisions were made was (legal) advice with respect to whether there was just cause to dismiss the six ministry employees either sought or provided.”

That passage drew a rebuttal from former deputy minister of health Graham Whitmarsh, who’d signed off on the dismissals back in 2012. “The statement was very surprising to him,” wrote his lawyer in an open letter to government. “Mr. Whitmarsh’s understanding at the time was that legal advice had been sought and was being provided with respect to whether there was just cause for the dismissal of the employees.”

Whitmarsh declined to cooperate in the McNeil review, suspecting that the narrow terms of reference were crafted in part to make him the scapegoat. For her part, McNeil says in the report that she “reviewed records from counsel with the ministry of justice which are confidential and/or privileged in nature.”

So it would appear that if the legal advice cited by Whitmarsh exists in written form, it was not included in the records shared with McNeil. One more loose end in a report that, for all of McNeil’s effort to do her best within the government-imposed limitations, contains far too many them...

Of course there is another possibility about the actual 'existence' of that legal advice, which Mr. Palmer declined to suggest.

All in all, it's a pretty thorough hard-hitting column until (surprise!) the Dean pulls his final punch so that, one can only presume that he can live on to hedge his bets, as required, in the next round:...Highlighting two more gaps in the record Wednesday, Opposition MLA Adrian Dix called on the Liberals to release details from the redacted-by-government appendices to the report.

The whited-out passages excluded key details of the flawed internal review that led to the firings as well as a chronology of the legal advice provided to government in the affair. Dix also repeated Opposition calls for a full-blown public inquiry with the power to call witnesses, compel testimony, secure all documents, and offer full legal protection to any whistleblowers.

Not likely will either the details or the inquiry be forthcoming. As the record to date suggests, the last thing the Clark government really wants is to get to the bottom of this affair...

Mr. Palmer does realize that lives were ruined here, right?

________In an interesting sidebar, Merv Adey wonders why, on the Twitmachine, it is that Mr. Palmer's column is so heckfire hard to actually find on the VSun's website...Editor responds that it is all because of 'refreshments'...Or some such thing.

Thursday, January 08, 2015

Stephen Rees, perhaps the most thoughtful (and thorough) transit blogger in Lotusland makes the case that, in the big scheme of things, that all this fuss about dollars lost to poor people getting on the bus for free really means nothing in the grand scheme of things for Translink:

Jordan Bateman of the Canadian Taxpayers is making a big fuss about the number of times CMBC bus drivers push the button which records “fare not paid”. He thinks that the loss of fare revenue is such a big issue that it justifies voting NO in the upcoming referendum. You can’t trust Translink, he says.

I thought it might be helpful to actually work out what the size of the problem might be – something that Travis Lupick has a shot at in the article I linked to above but fails to make clear. The Average Fare on Translink was $1.86 in 2012 (Source: Translink) and the size of the business (according to Lupick’s article) $1.41 billion. 2,762,363 button pushes multiplied by $1.86 is a revenue loss of $5,137,995.10. It looks like a big number but it is 0.36% of the amount needed to cover Translink’s expenses...

The BC Finance Ministry has produced a report much more critical of Partnerships BC and its activities around public private partnerships (P3s) than might have been expected by a province so committed to the practice. It raises issues of conflict of interest, dubious practices and questionable assumptions in the multi- billion dollar program...

One of the more interesting specific bits from the report, from a conflictyness point of view, was the following:

...The report also identifies (although it dismisses) the potential conflict of interest of hiring of the former PBC Chief Executive Officer, Larry Blain, as its Board Chair and then contracting with him to provide other services...

So.

Why has the public heard so little about this report that was released, you guessed it, just before Christmas?

Well, because, according to Mr. Reynolds at least, there has only been one established and credible proMedia story focussed on it so far from the VTC's Les Leyne although, as you might expect Mr. Leyne's view of the report is quite different from that of the CCPA's Mr. Reynolds.

Wednesday, January 07, 2015

Remember that crazy, mixed-up, non-credible top 10 list of bizarre things we thought the Clark government just might, but probably wouldn't, do in the upcoming year?

Well, it would appear that reality trumped that list, all in one day, just yesterday.

First off, Ian Mulgrew of the VSun has the story of the supreme court judge, and not the one who ruled for the teachers, is incensed that the Ms. Clark's Ministry of Children and Family Development did their very best to not do the right thing by a kid in trouble.

And then there was the report from Tamsyn Burgmann of the CPress about how the Clark government's prosecution is implementing one the first of 63 recommendations from Mr. Oppal's missing women inquiry, which is the good news. The bad news is the following, buried way, way under the lede:

...Other associated recommendations have yet to be completed, (Kasari) Govender of (Westcoast LEAF) said, including providing funding for research looking into why vulnerable witnesses are not believed in court and how that can be fixed...

And how about the flippety, floppity, flippettier and floppiest by Clarklandian transportation minister Todd Stone on the Translink tax as reported by the SLeader's Jeff Nagel?

Gosh.

It would appear that the polling and the focus groups and the business coalition must be driving the Clarklandian's crazy, because even Ms. Clark herself, at least according to the minions running her always quick-winning office has kinda/sorta, but not really reversed herself as well according to CTV News:

...Premier Christy Clark previously said it would be up to the TransLink Mayors’ Council to convince voters to accept the hike, and it’s unclear whether she will personally push for the “Yes” side.

She was unavailable for comment on Tuesday, but in a year-end interview with CTV News last month she spoke cautiously about the referendum.

“If people vote yes, we’re going to take that direction and make it work,” Clark said.

The Premier’s office said Tuesday that Clark will be voting “Yes.”...

Don't know about you but I, for one, sure am glad that our fine Premier doesn't need a weathervane to know which way the wind blows.

And then there was the Minister for Everything, Rich Coleman, who had his good friend and colleague Black Press' Tom Fletcher let us know that, while there will be no previously promised legislation, there will be 'regulation' to ensure that none of the crazy quilt patchwork of proposed gas pipes will be turned into dilbit conveyors, ever.

Don't know about you, but I sure do feel good about the permanence of a little red tape slapped on a set of big pipes by big Rich.

And speaking of permanence....

In the other 'big story' of the day, the Dean himself let us know that we shouldn't worry our pretty heads about the distinct possibility that the $344 billion in planned capital projects that the Clarklandians love to trumpet as a measure of their success won't happen. Why? Because the smart boys from the business land have crunched the numbers and told Mr. Palmer that it was always meant to be that way. Talk about a water carrying assist on the continued downgrading of Ms. Clark's Sparkle Ponies that began some time ago.

B.C.’s transportation minister says he’s frustrated with the slow pace of change within BC Ferries and says the corporation should look at cutting back on managers and free rides for employees before it looks for increased government subsidies and higher fares...

Hmmmmmm.....

And who foisted the quasi-private, management-heavy structure on we, the people, that we, the same people, are paying for in every way imaginable, including yet another 4% fee hike to come this year as well?

Well...

I'm pretty sure that Rich Coleman and/or Sean Leslie or some such luminary will soon tell us that the Dippers made them do it.

And I'm even more pretty surer that the Ledgie Boys will then weigh-in with sage advice about how the Knotty Gordians had to do 'something' because the pre-Hahn subsidy for actual ships and crews 'n things had just gotten too darned large and, besides, people who live on islands shouldn't be getting stuff for free.

Or some such thing.

****

Meanwhile, speaking of further fare increases and the damage they do, here is what Mr. Shaw of the Sun says our fine Premier had to say about that:

...Fares are “about as high as they can get without really impacting ridership,” said Premier Christy Clark...

Which once again demonstrates just how challenging actual reality can actually be for our fine Premier, particularly as it pertains to things that actually matter to the actual citizenry.

Sheesh.

__________You want actual numbers and graphs and stuff to demonstrate how divorced from reality Ms. Clark is on this issue?....Norm Farrell's got 'em...And we're pretty sure Chris Montgomery might have something to say about this too...

Is it to make it possible for the Premier and her exponentially expanding entourage to ring up massive bills without having to submit them to budgetary scrutiny so that they can all fly to, say, Regina at the drop of a hat.

Or is it so that Ms. Clark can call in the helicopters when the Legislative press gallery is finally forced by evil circumstance to ask her to explain the following in the wake of developments in the coming Bonney/Robertson trial:

So, finally, with all that preamble...

Why call in the leased helicopters to land on the Ledge lawn when such questions are asked?

Well, that way Ms. Clark can make like the Gipper himself as she says to the Keef, hand to ear while 'dry/ibbling' her way towards the whirring of the blades...

"Sorry...But.....I...Just..Can't...Hear you!"

****

That's it folks all ten for the 2015 to come...Please remember that all prognostications are completely and utterly non-credible because we are, after all, nothing but......Idiot bloggers.

Sunday, January 04, 2015

In the years since the De Halve Maan brewery opened a bottling facility outside Bruges (Belgium) in 2010, the company’s faced a tricky logistics problem. It still brews beer at its original site downtown, just as it has for nearly five centuries. To get all that delicious beer to the new factory for filtration, bottling, and shipping, it uses trucks...

{snip}

...No more. The city council has approved the brewery’s unusual but clever plan to save time and money while reducing emissions and congestion. It will build a pipeline to ferry the good stuff across town, underground. Yes, you read that right: A beer pipeline.

Instead of making the 3-mile drive in one of dozens of tankers that traverse town each day, the award-winning beer will flow through a 1.8-mile polyethylene pipeline, making the trip in 15 to 20 minutes. The pipeline will move 6,000 liters of beer every hour...

I mean, can you imagine what would happen if a homegrown beer pipeline of our very own were to spring a leak?

Somehow I don't think there would be much spillage to even begin cleaning up.

_______Tip O' The Toque to E-car guy John Stonier on the Twittmachine.

To mollify revolting PAB-Bots (see prediction #4), the Premier announces a new 'Megaproject Lottery Contest' program in which members of the 'public' (i.e. does not exclude those average joes with lucrative media monitoring contracts) can propose new ways to waste millions and, maybe even, billions.

Preference will be given to those proposals that include corporate money-shovel funnels/subsidies and quick winning slammer-jammers.

At the unveiling Ms. Clark states emphatically that there is no truth to the rumour that this will be a Dobell-Rogers production.

When she is asked about the actual level of the actual quota the Premier will reportedly reply:

"Don't worry, it's only 20%. And if, say, BC Ferries is having trouble meeting the annual quota they can always fill all their summer positions with fine folks from Madagascar and Mazatlan. As for all those local kids looking for summer jobs to pay (a small chunk of) their (ballooning) university tuition? Well, there's a whole world of unpaid intern positions out there. Alternatively, they might want to travel to India or spend a season or three at the Sorbonne. After all, academic tourism worked out just fine for me!"